Digital Futures

Thanks to an early-day tip off from Manchester Bloggers, I got to attend the Digital Futures seminar earlier this week - held at the BBC on Oxford Road. The two presentations I caught were both excellent. Richard Adams from Chemistry Digital and Mike Ryan from Idaho both gave inspirational, upbeat accounts of how Web 2.0 technologies were changing the face of media and communications. Both plugged social networking as the new form of business advertising, and Mike proved it quite convincingly with some well-chosen links to You Tube and My Space. The other common theme was the convergence of media, and the need for content developers to make their products available in bite-sized chunks and a multiplicity of forms. I was glad to hear this, because it's something we are doing here at MANTEX right now. The BBC offices were spooky though - cramped, claustrophobic, and Kafkaesque. No wonder they think they are part of the government.